How LLMs Influence Perceived Bias in Journalism

Asteria Kaeberlein, Malihe Alikhani


Abstract
As the use of generative AI tools in journalistic writing becomes more common, reporters have expressed growing concerns about how it may introduce bias to their works. This paper investigates how the integration of large language models (LLMs) into journalistic writing, both as editors and independent ‘authors’, can alter user perception of bias in media. We show novel insights into how human perception of media bias differs from automatic evaluations. Through human evaluations comparing original human-authored articles, AI-edited articles, and AI-generated articles, we show that while LLMs rarely introduce new bias and often trend towards neutrality, this supposedly ‘safe’ behavior can have harmful impacts. This is most observable in sensitive human rights contexts, where the AI’s neutral and measured tone can reduce the representation of relevant voices and present misinformation in a more convincing manner. Furthermore, we demonstrate the existence of previously unidentified patterns that existing automated bias detection methods fail to accurately capture. We underscore the critical need for human-centered evaluation frameworks in AI-assisted journalism by introducing human evaluations and contrasting against a state-of-the-art automated bias detection system.
Anthology ID:
2025.ranlp-1.59
Volume:
Proceedings of the 15th International Conference on Recent Advances in Natural Language Processing - Natural Language Processing in the Generative AI Era
Month:
September
Year:
2025
Address:
Varna, Bulgaria
Editors:
Galia Angelova, Maria Kunilovskaya, Marie Escribe, Ruslan Mitkov
Venue:
RANLP
SIG:
Publisher:
INCOMA Ltd., Shoumen, Bulgaria
Note:
Pages:
501–510
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2025.ranlp-1.59/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Asteria Kaeberlein and Malihe Alikhani. 2025. How LLMs Influence Perceived Bias in Journalism. In Proceedings of the 15th International Conference on Recent Advances in Natural Language Processing - Natural Language Processing in the Generative AI Era, pages 501–510, Varna, Bulgaria. INCOMA Ltd., Shoumen, Bulgaria.
Cite (Informal):
How LLMs Influence Perceived Bias in Journalism (Kaeberlein & Alikhani, RANLP 2025)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2025.ranlp-1.59.pdf